


Exile

by RiverK



Category: Daredevil (TV), Iron Fist (Comic), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avocados, Blindness, Catholicism, Character of Color, Coming Out, Crossover, F/F, Foggy's superpower is kindness, Gen, Immortal Iron Fist - Freeform, Internalized Homophobia, K'un-Lun, Kafka References, Law School, Nelson and Murdock, OFC - Freeform, OMC - Freeform, POV Second Person, Post-Season/Series 01, Queer Character, That thing where it's from the Reader's POV, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unrequited Crush, Wuxia, alien-worshiping snake heroin cult, cultural dissonance, doctrine, everybody was kung-fu fighting, fictional K'un-Lun adjacent Third-World banana republic, illegal immigrant, indirect allusions to hypothetical future Netflix Immortal Iron Fist, massive amounts of artistic license, multi-lingual character, that is not how to geography, the cult of the Steel Snake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 08:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 12,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4093561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverK/pseuds/RiverK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’re the newly-hired legal researcher at Nelson and Murdock. They tell you that it doesn’t really matter where you’re from, and for the most part, it doesn’t. Not until where you’re from comes back to bite you in the ass.</p>
<p>Indirect crossover with the (presently) hypothetical Netflix adaptation of Iron Fist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reader

**Author's Note:**

> Prayer to prevent lawsuits: Our Marvel, who art in Disney, hallowed be thy Name. Thy characters come, thy will be done, in Fandom as it is in Netflix. Give us this day, our daily Daredevil, and forgive us our badfic, as we forgive poor creative decisions sinned against us. Do not sue us or our pets, and deliver us from lawyers. Amen. 
> 
> I profit not from the base narrative’s transformation and/or (mis)use. Yea therefore: Get thee behind me, Counselor!
> 
> Obsessively re-edited: 12 June 2015, because my lack of a beta-reader makes me paranoid. Also because I forgot to mention a few assumptions:  
> 1\. Netflix's _Defenders_ series will include _Iron Fist_ (Wo0t!!!!), and it is set in the same universe as Daredevil  
>  2\. The Iron Fist show will include the historical events portrayed in Marvel's _Immortal Iron Fist_ run, which implies that cultures in adjacent/affected places will have folklore revolving around the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven  
>  3\. Madam Gao is from one of the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, and she is a scarrehbetch with fingers in a LOT of pies

When you told your uncle that you wanted a fresh start, he didn’t ask questions. He knew that you and your fiancé had broken up, and he knew that you’d had some trouble while you were in law school, but he told you that he didn’t want to know the details. He’s one of your favorite uncles, and he knows how complicated and suffocating the rest of your family can be. He had been trying to get you to move to the States since you’d entered law school. “You can work for me when you graduate,” he’d said, months before you learned that you’d flunked out. “You’re going to one of the best institutions in the country, there’s an ordinance here that says graduates of your school are allowed to take the New York Bar if you make a particular grade. And while you’re studying for it, you can intern at my office. I know you want to do your part there, but I tell you, that rotten system will kill you from the inside with its graft and inefficiency. Just give this place a try for a couple of months. Maybe you’ll change your mind after you get a better feel for the legal system here. It’s tidier to navigate, and it’s a lot less corrupt than it is there.” Except you’d stuck to your proverbial guns and said that you wanted to carve out your own life.

He’d paid for your undergrad tuition, and even though you know that he would have simply seen it as his family duty, the complicated intersection of tradition, Western values, and economic reality that you and your generation inhabit make you uncomfortable about accepting handouts. You have nothing useful or material to contribute to the family at this point, and all the American TV and Western literature you’ve watched and read fill you with a rebellious, pressing need to be profoundly, publicly _yourself_ , on your own terms. It clashes with everything you know about being a good child. You imagine that your parents’ generation had doubtless never felt that need with such intensity. And after everything you’ve already tried and failed to become, you don’t want to deal with that kind of guilt.

Now though, you contact him again. You have run out of options and all you want –all you need- is to leave and never return. He calls you on Skype and his pixilated face looks kind, but washed out in the indoor light. “Your mother didn’t tell you?” he says, “I’m retiring.”

And you understand. The life of an immigrant is hard. Your uncle is lucky. He got in legally, and he’s carved out a good life there, despite all of the cultural and physical incongruities a foreigner needs to negotiate with American life --that familiar, unshakable sense that you would never quite _belong_. Your cousin, his son, just completed his specialization at St. Luke’s, and he’s capable of taking care of himself. He’s living in a two-room in the Bronx, and he’d started sending dollars and care packages home shortly after he started his residency. Your parents and uncles and aunts love talking about how he’s a big-shot doctor in New York. You envy him enough to almost resent him, but after all of the summers you’d spent together being stupid and young, you know the pressure he’s had to deal with: to be _good_. You know that he knows how you feel, even if he will probably never understand your regret.

Your uncle tells you about how excited he is about getting all his affairs in order so he can take his retirement and set about opening a little farm resort in a property he’d acquired in the mountains near your family home. He’s wrapping up his part in his law practice, getting ready to pass it on to his partners. They’re scaling down, he tells you, and they can’t afford to hire anyone new.

“There’s a new firm down in Clinton though. Students of mine from when I’d done that lecturing stint at Columbia Law. Good kids. They’re looking for a legal researcher. If you want, I can ask them if the position’s still open.”


	2. Karen Page

“Hi New Girl,” she says, as if you’ve already gotten the job. And before you can stop yourself, you’re thinking about how the sun from window must be hitting her just _so_ , because it looks like she’s glowing. She is, quite possibly, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen.

You find your breath between one second and the next, and it’s a good thing too, because she’s already next to you with her hand outstretched. You take her hand and give it a shake. Her palms are surprisingly rough; like she’s spent too much time knuckle deep in cleaning agents, scrubbing apartment floors. You manage a smile.

“Hi,” you say, and you give her your name, even though she probably already knows. “Miss Karen?” You recognize her voice from the phone call about your scheduled interview, but it always pays to be sure.

She gestures for you to have a seat in a battered brown leather couch. “Yup, good to finally meet you face to face.” And she flashes you a smile that makes the backs of your knees weak down to your ankles.


	3. Nelson and Murdock, (Avocados) Abogados Habilitados

“Miss uh...” Mr. Nelson trips over your baroque, polysyllabic Sino-Malay name. You nod encouragingly when he finally gets the pronunciation right. You like him. He’s funny, in that American sort of way. Beside him, his partner’s mouth widens in an amused, close-lipped smile. “So your uncle tells us you went to law school?”

They’re your age, you realize. At most, a couple of years older. If you had continued your studies and actually applied yourself, you would have graduated earlier this year and already taken the national Bar back at home. In another world, you could end up co-counsels on a consolidated private international law class-action case against some multinational mega-corporation with operations in multiple jurisdictions; working with them, not applying to work _for_ them. You know you shouldn’t feel resentment about that, but there it is. And it rests in your throat like a lump of smoldering coal, which you hate, because they seem like such nice guys. And in that other world, maybe you could have been friends.

You nod again. “I didn’t make the grade cutoff for my final year, and I decided not to continue my studies.” You’re used to having been the academic one in the family. You weren’t much good at anything else, but you’d still dreamed of making your parents proud, of being able to send money back home so you could support them and contribute to the rest of the clan. But it’s funny how things work out. And despite all the decisions that you know you’d make again in a heartbeat, your failure to make that dream a reality stings more than you’d care to admit.

So before you can stop yourself, you continue. “I don’t believe in the legal system back at home. I’d done part-time work at a legal aid office –low income families, environmental rights, things like that- and I’d had to pursue a legal matter of my own, and I just couldn’t stop seeing how everything is just set up to disempower those who already barely have any voice. It was all so, so-” You gesture vaguely, trying to capture the right word, the right note of repugnance that memories send roiling in your gut, “-wrong. I mean, I know the law. But- but there are too many gaps between procedural and substantive law, and no matter how strong the letter of the it is, if a jurisdiction doesn’t have the political will for substantive implementation, any legislation will be nothing more than a paper tiger. None of the rules at home have any teeth unless vested interests give it to them. The system does nothing but perpetuate the interests of a powerful and entrenched elite. The corruption pervades the entire structure, and there’s no way to make it right, not even from the inside out. It’s not a happy thing to learn.” For a moment, you let yourself breathe, and you remind yourself that you’re far away, and that it’s all in the past. “Some… things happened, and I admit that I’d performed less than optimally at school. It was probably for the best. If I’d stayed, I might have ended up taking the law into my own hands.”

Mr. Nelson gives Mr. Murdock an eloquent look, but it’s in a language you cannot read. Mr. Murdock’s face betrays nothing but a sudden, grim hardness in his reserved smile. Like he knows exactly what you mean.


	4. Foggy

Mr. Nelson and Miss Karen invite you to join them for drinks after work. Mr. Murdock says something about how they’d had a long day and he wants to come in early tomorrow, and he tells all of you to have a good time.

After a couple of drinks and some probing questions from you, they tell you the story of how their scrappy little firm took down the rising Hell’s Kitchen crime kingpin named Wilson Fisk. You’ve heard about it in passing from your uncle, but they fill in the details with elaborate gestures.

You manage not to freeze when they mention how one of Fisk’s operations was a heroin distribution ring that used blinded illegal immigrants from China. You almost mention that not all of them are from China, but your voice twists itself in your throat. And when Ben and Elena are mentioned, they lapse into a silence so vivid that you almost drown in it. All three of you stare quietly into your drinks for several moments after.

Then they start up an old discussion about eels in alcohol. It somehow degenerates into a thumb-war with you filling in the role of referee. You probably haven’t laughed that hard in ages. Not since things between you and your fiancé fell apart. 

Karen –and it _is_ Karen now; she’d given you a look that actually scared you (and maybe turned you on) a little, the third time you’d prefaced her name with “Miss”- leaves after four drinks, a buzzed smile perched on her flower-colored lips. You think about how she feels like an English garden, all roses and delicate lines, and you tell yourself to shut up. You’re a professional, goddammit. You keep your work-life relegated to work. But, all the same, your eyes drift towards the curve of her hips and line of her legs underneath her skirt as she walks away.

You blush then, and cast desperately about for something to discuss. “My fiancé and I broke up, that’s why I’m here,” you blurt out to Foggy. He’d completely ignored you when you called him Mr. Nelson; in fact, he'd pointedly asked the bartender why people were always looking for his dad. So, laughing, you’d conceded to the informality with a roll of your eyes. You have already downed two more shots of the thinned-out gasoline that he had generously referred to as whiskey. You probably shouldn’t be talking about these things with your boss right after your first day on the job (didn’t you just remind yourself that you’re a professional?), but you’d never had much of a stomach for alcohol, and the world is already starting to muffle into comfortable warmth. “Things got messy. And then um. It got too… Franz Kafka.”

He cocks his head at you, and you take that as a cue to continue. “I loved him, don’t get me wrong.” He frowns. You think maybe he wants to ask you about your reference to absurd existentialist literary bureaucracy, but you don’t want to get into the complicated details. You’re too drunk to explain any of that nonsense lucidly nor objectively anyway. Or maybe you’re not nearly drunk enough.

“Before things fell apart, he was the best person I’d ever known. Kind, sweet, intelligent, abs like carved hardwood under brushed silk? But then he got me mixed up in some crazy shit, you know?” You down another shot in one burning gulp. “I mean, it was, like, hardcore, gun-to-my-head, acid-in-my-eyes, diplomatic incident kind of Crazy Shit. You can’t even know. And I mean, when someone does that to you, how do you stay with them? Especially when they’ve clearly gone too far into territory where you can’t follow?”

You rapidly pour yourself another shot and take a burning swallow. “AndalsoIlikegirls.”

Foggy cups his hand over your next shot glass and pulls it away. “Slow down there, Slugger. Here, have some water first.” He waves at the woman behind the bar –Josie? Rosie? You can’t recall- for a glass of water. You wrinkle your nose at him, but you take the glass when it materializes in front of you.

“I mean, I like women. I like men too, but I… I like women more. Much more.” You take a sip, and you realize that your hands are shaking. You’ve only said this aloud once before, to yourself. Sometimes, it still doesn’t feel real. In your mind’s eye, you suddenly see Karen’s gaze sharpen and zero in on you. And your lips and cheeks feel too warm. A giggle spills out of your mouth before you can stop it. “I can’t believe I’ve just told you that,” you say to Foggy. “I haven’t come out to anyone else. Not even my parents.” You snort. “They’d throw a fit.” You manage to snatch your captured drink from Foggy’s growing stockpile and take out half the shot. “Oh God.”

Foggy pulls the shot glass away from you again, and shakes his head. “Well,” he says. “Your uncle had put in the good word for you, but we’d hired you on your own merits, you know. Matt had been impressed by your little diatribe during the interview, and I could tell that you knew what you’d been talking about. We have this unprofitable habit of fighting for the underdog, so we figured you’d fit right in. And,” He looks around and leans closer towards you, “don’t tell anyone, but you’re the only one who applied.” He thinks he’s being discreet when he snatches your shot glass away and drinks down the remainder of your shot. “Also, you’ve seen how lily white Nelson and Murdock is. We already have the disabled demographic covered with Matt, but we needed a minority to round out our quota. Someone brown.” He gestures towards you with an exaggerated flourish, and you decide to roll with it by taking a bow that almost tilts you off your stool.

“And now you know I’m kinda queer as well.” It terrifies you to say it out loud, even after all the choices you’ve had to make because you know it to be true.

Foggy’s smile rests easily on his face. He obviously isn’t fazed, and you feel a warmth towards him that almost makes you want to cry. “Not white and not straight? That’s perfect! Now we don’t have to hire anyone else.”

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep your grin from getting away from you. “You’re welcome,” you say magnanimously. And maybe it wouldn’t be too unprofessional to give this man a hug.

“And now, Miss… um… Because I couldn’t pronounce your name even when I was sober, I hereby dub thee, Twofer.”


	5. Matt

Mr. Murdock is already in the office when you come in the morning after.

“Morning,” he whispers from the kitchenette after you very carefully close the office door. His voice is unobtrusive after the unbelievable tumult of input that had been your hung-over morning commute. He waves his mug of coffee at you and smiles.

“Good morning, Sir,” you rasp back. You congratulate yourself on the fact that you don’t wince at the vibrations created by your own voice.

“Just Matt, please.”

“Good morning, Matt.”

His lips stretch into that soft, amused smile. He pulls a new mug from the cupboard and holds it in your direction. “Foggy and Karen take you to Josie’s?”

You hum in response as you take the proffered mug. The coffee pot is still three fourths full. The man is a saint.

“Did they make you drink the eel?”

Despite the lance of pain it causes, you laugh. “No, they made me referee the thumb war initiated by a discussion about the eel.”

“On your first night out? You’re going to make a guy jealous. I kinda wish I didn’t beg off.”

“Then next time, don’t,” you say. Belatedly, you realize that you’re being a bit forward with your new boss. You just hope he hears the smile in your tone. “It would have been cool if you joined us. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to carry Foggy down the five blocks to his place on my own.” Then, unconsciously, you make a tiny, happy sex noise at the coffee. It’s made from cheap beans, but it’s exactly the strength it has to be to help you power through the hangover you’ve acquired on your second morning on the job.

His mouth quirks to the side at the sound. “I’m glad you appreciate my coffee-making skills.” 

You splutter uselessly in an attempt to formulate an appropriate response, but your hangover snags any wit you might presume to possess, and leaves it hanging just outside of your reach. You feel your face heat up in embarrassment. 

He drains the last of his own mug, rinses it out, and leaves it on the dish rack to dry. He nods at you as he leaves the kitchenette. “There’s Advil in the third cupboard to your right,” he says. “You have a good morning, Twofer.”

You thought you’d resent having someone impose a name on you so deliberately, but you find yourself glad that this nickname sticks.


	6. Nelson and Murdock

Without your noticing, you start attaching familial honorifics to the people with whom you work. Foggy and Matt become “elder brother Foggy” and “elder brother Matt,” and in your language, it doesn’t take up quite so many syllables, so that’s what you start calling them in your head.

Karen, oddly enough, just stays Karen. And that feels right too.


	7. Matt (Interlude: religious diversity, or: Matt randomly listens to a confession)

You see him in your neighborhood’s church, during the 10am Sunday mass. He’s lining up for Communion, which is something that you haven’t gotten around to doing in a long time. You tell yourself that you don’t believe in it anymore, but it still feels wrong to take in the Body of Christ when you live in a state of unshriven Mortal Sin. Especially now. After you’ve finally decided to own up to who you truly are.

After all the things you’ve failed to set right.

Even when you hadn’t been ready to admit it to yourself then, you’d been paying close attention during the Theology elective you took back in undergrad. You know that being gay isn’t a sin; it’s acting on it that’s sinful. But now that you’re embracing it, even if you haven’t exactly done any acting, you feel your sins billowing around you like a great, black cape. And that isn’t even counting just how many times you’d purposely missed Sunday mass.

You find him in one of the front pews after the mass. The priest is outside chatting with some of the other parishioners, and most of the congregation has gone their own way. Matt sits completely still. He tilts his head obliquely towards the ceiling, either asleep or deep in thought. You sit a couple of feet to his right, wondering if he knows that you’re there.

The church’s vaulted ceiling echoes with the sounds of the fading congregation. You let the smell of incense and candle wax seep into your skin. Aside from the encroaching nip in the September air, it doesn’t smell much different from home. You break the silence by clearing your throat.

“Hi Matt,” you say.

“Twofer.” He doesn’t sound surprised. “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

You shrug. “Born and raised,” you say. “The Vatican and I are never going to see eye to eye on issues like sex and reproduction, but it’s good to have a system of guidelines to align my moral compass to.” You inhale the smell of candles and think about garlands of tropical night jasmine hanging from the necks and outstretched arms of patron saints. “And now that I’m here, going to mass reminds me of home. It reminds me of who I am.”

He nods.

Maybe it’s the resonant quiet of high ceilings and stained glass. Maybe it’s the smell of incense still lingering in the air. Maybe it’s the confessional booths, sitting quiet and dark in the shadows by the walls. But you find yourself still talking, and you’re not so sure how to stop. “My family’s one of the only Catholic families in my neighborhood,” you say. “My grandparents had migrated there to get away from a dictatorship in the seventies, and they made sure that none of their children and grandchildren ever forgot where we were from. Every week, we had to travel to a city an hour and a half away to get to church. If the monsoon flooded the roads, we’d attend the Russian Orthodox mass in the next town over. It’s isn’t exactly Roman Catholic, but it’s similar enough for my grandparents to not care.” And you smile at the memory of your grandfather’s cramped commuter van, of too many limbs and elbows and behinds wrestling with one another and jockeying for space. How, despite the tight squeeze, everyone wore their nicest clothes and put on too much perfume, so that the space perpetually stank of too many colognes and too much intermingled sweat. 

“Everyone else was something else. Tao Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Muslim, Born Again, alien-worshipping snake heroin cult…” You swallow down a sudden surge of bile at having said the last one aloud. Matt makes a low, questioning sound from the back of his throat. You’re staring resolutely at a spot behind the altar, but you still see him cock his head inquisitively at you out of the corner of your eye.

“The city where I’d grown up is pretty much a dumping ground for all the penniless migrants from the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe. I admit, my family is relatively well off, compared to a lot of people there. And it would’ve been really easy for me to just fade into the background of society and sort of… toil until I wasn’t in as shitty a situation as the rest of my country, but I had my family. I had my family’s faith. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing I have left.”


	8. Karen, Matt

When your old eye injury flares up, you’re poring through an index for case law, looking for precedents on a child custody case involving an abusive parent, a drug addict, and the firm’s latest client, a concerned aunt. You don’t recognize the ache working its way through your sclera until the words on the book blur, and a fat drop of fluid leaves a small, dark circle on the page. You close your eyes and mutter a curse.

You’re sitting at your usual spot in the fold-out table across from Karen’s, and she’s busy sorting through forms. “You OK, Twofer?” she asks. You twitch in surprise and bite back a second curse. Ever since you’d first gotten your eyes messed up, the injury flares like psychosomatic clockwork. Every time you go through a major change, your body punishes you to remind you who’s boss. You’d gone out of commission for almost a month after the split with your fiancé, five days when you’d learned you’d washed out of school, and now you’ve moved to a new city. Hell, you’ve moved to an entirely different country, and the season is reddening into a shockingly chilly fall. You aren’t used to having seasons other than “sweltering,” and “almost not sweltering.” You’re still settling into your job, and you’re trying to navigate around the opened floodgate that your libido has become, thanks to having finally begun to process more than two and a half decades of internalized homophobia and sexual repression. You’re kind of shocked that it took this long. But you’d hoped that it would flare up on a weekend; sometime when it wouldn’t get in the way of your job. It’s really embarrassing.

You hear the sound of Karen’s chair being pushed back. Her shoes clatter on the floor towards you. You swallow around a hard lump of humiliation and remembered rage, and shove your hand under your glasses to cover your eyes. “Oh God, Twouf, you’re crying. What’s wrong?” Karen’s hands are warm on your back. You lean into it, even though you don’t mean to. Her palm draws circles along your shoulder blades. You can smell the tangerine in her shampoo, and underneath that, the delicate, powdery scent that you’ve learned to associate with _her_. You breathe a little too deeply into her proximity, and you hope your hair covers up the heat rising in your cheeks.

There’s a rustle of blazer material from Foggy’s office, and you can imagine him leaning against the side of the doorway, peering at you. “Everything OK?” he asks. And a beat later, “Oh no, Twofer, Dude, what happened?”

“It’s no big deal.” You keep your voice light, but humiliation gives it a high note that you wish you knew how to suppress. “Uh, I messed up my eyes last year.” That’s all you can force yourself to say on that, so you barrel forward. “The scar tissue’s a bit weaker, so it gets irritated really easily. I’m not actually crying, I swear. I’m probably just tired or not used to the cold or something. I’ve got a prescription for this, don’t worry.” You pull out a handkerchief to blot the liquid out. You’re tearing up in a steady stream now, and you blink rapidly to see if it’ll clear up. Flashes of vision lance into you like flickers of fire as you blink, and the movement feels like blades scraping against your irises. It just makes the tears flow even more freely.

You swear under your breath. “This should sort itself out in a bit. I’ve been reading all day. I probably just need to, uh, rest my eyes or something. Maybe sit somewhere dark.” You know that isn’t true, but maybe, if you want it enough, it will be. But from the way the pain has progressed from “mild discomfort” to “hot pokers in your skull,” you know you’ll be out for at least a couple of days.

“You can stay in my office,” Matt’s voice is suddenly above your desk like smoke. You try not to gasp in surprise. He moves like a cat without his cane. Someone ought to put a bell on him. “I don’t need the lights on anyway.”

You clench your jaw and bite back the reflexive refusal already waiting in your throat. “Thanks,” you say. And without your asking, he somehow finds your hand. Gently, the way you’ve seen Foggy do for him, he guides your hand to his elbow. You take it as a cue to get up. Hot humiliation wells up inside of you, and you duck your head to let your hair hide your face from view. A fresh tear seeps out of your right eye.

Karen lingers a little longer than she should. You wish she wouldn’t. You don’t like having people fuss over you. But your attention drifts towards her presence all the same, until you sense that you’ve crossed into Matt’s office. 

Even through your closed eyelids, you can tell that it’s darker here. Which, with the growing photophobia, makes it hurt infinitesimally less.

“You can let go now,” he says into the stillness. “Really Twouf, you’re squeezing kinda hard.”

“Oh shit, I’m so sorry.” You let go, and you’re adrift in the middle of an abyss. Your heart hammers in your ears, and you take a long, slow breath to calm yourself.

“It’s OK,” he replies. “It’s OK.” He speaks gently, and once again, there’s his hand, warm through your sleeve. You let yourself exhale. “Have a seat. There’s a chair two steps in front of you.”

“Where?” You negotiate the darkness with a lot less grace than he does, and it’s that competitive energy that gets you to move. He doesn’t nudge you in any particular direction, but he maintains the point of contact on your arm, and you feel like it’s the only thing keeping you from floating away.

“OK, maybe three steps. I keep forgetting how much shorter than me you are.”

“Got it, thanks.” You sink into the chair with a barely-suppressed sigh of relief.

“If you want to keep on working, I’ve got some case law on audio file,” he says. You hear him shuffle back behind his desk.

And as you tuck your legs close to you in the chair, you try to find your way around telling him how much you love him for not making this a big deal.


	9. Karen

Two hours later, and your eyes are still trying to impersonate Niagara Falls. Matt suggests that you take the day off. You refuse on principle; with all the audio material Matt has available to him, you’re still perfectly capable of doing your job. Foggy chimes in. He reassures you that they won’t dock your pay or mess with your desk while you’re away. “We appreciate that you’re dedicated to your job, but I don’t want to have to end up calling you Threefer,” he says. “Besides, Matt already has that last demographic covered.”

Despite yourself, you stifle a laugh. And maybe he has a point, but you shake your head again. This time, the entire firm presents a united front. Karen volunteers to manhandle you home. You have no choice but to capitulate.

Whenever you open your eyes, there is a thick, liquid film over everything you see, and the effort of doing so forces you to swallow a sob of pain. Even with your glasses on, the world has contracted to brief flashes of a tiny, blurred circle two feet in front of you. And you’re loath to admit it, but you’re not sure if you can make it to your place without help.

The daylight outside hurts far more than the artificial lights in the office do. The autumn air nips at the tear-tracks down your cheeks, and you duck your head so that the outside is filtered through the thick, protective layer of your hair. You latch on to Karen’s arm far more tightly than is strictly necessary, holding the length of it flush against your chest, your fingers digging into the soft material of her sleeve. It’s less because you like her, and more because everything has become an overwhelming tumult of noise and pain-filled flashes of incomprehensible light. If it had been Foggy or Matt or your landlady, you would have held on just as hard. Karen has become your anchor; the one point in the universe that you know is sane and safe.

You tell her the address, and nudge her in the direction you know your place to be. “Uh, there’s going to be a drug store about a block before we have to take a right. Do you think we could stop by there? I want to be done with this-” You disengage your left hand from her arm and gesture vehemently at your face and the streaming points of hot pain that your eyes have become. “I have the prescription in my wallet.” You’ve only had this happen in public once before, but once is enough for you. When it comes to these kinds of things, you learn fast.

You think you hear Karen nod; it’s a swish of soft hair over thick cotton and a puff of breath over the chaos of music and traffic and the homeless man across the street screeching about damnation and hellfire from above. Her fingers are warm and rough over your hand. “Sure,” she says. And both of you set off at a respectable pace.

The walk is quiet, and it feels much longer than it usually does. But she doesn’t distract you with background chatter, and only pipes up to warn you of obstacles in your path. It’s a relief. You’re having enough trouble wading through the overwhelming excess of audio input to have to process a conversation on top of that. She’s probably learned from hanging out with Matt. And you tell yourself that you’re lucky that Nelson and Murdock has experience with these kinds of situations.

Your place is a fourth floor studio walkup that’s barely the size of a public toilet stall. Still, it’s a fifteen minute walk from the office, and it’s just about the only place in Hell’s Kitchen you can afford. Your cousin had invited you to rent the spare room at his place, but you’ve seen the subways in the mornings. While you’ve fought through your share of third world rush hour urban commutes, now that you’re starting over in New York City, you aren’t exactly eager to make it part of your daily routine again. Besides, you haven’t come out to your cousin either, and you’re not so sure how he’d react if and when you finally find the stones to take someone home.

“This is me,” you say when she tells you that you’re in front of the door marked “4D.”

There’s a doubtful silence as you fish your keys out of your bag and open the door.

“You’re going to be OK, Twouf?” You think you can hear a mix of judgment and pity in her voice, but you’re self-aware enough to know that you have enough inadequacy issues to overflow the Hudson, and that you’re probably reading too much into her tone.

You nod, but you don’t release your hold on her arm. “You uh, wanna come in for a quick breather or something? I’ve got um. I think I have bananas.”

You hope she refuses so that she won’t see just how cramped and shitty your apartment is, but you also hope she doesn’t, so that you don’t have to be alone. She smells like exhaust and citrus, and you still haven’t quite let go of her arm.

“Sure,” she says. And you feel her shrug. “I have to make sure you’ll be OK alone anyway. Otherwise, Matt and Foggy’ll have my head.”

She’s quiet when she steps into your apartment. Moments after you put away yours, you hear her shoes click onto the bottom of the tall bookshelf you’ve positioned beside the door, right next to the broken-down hat rack you’d picked up off the curb three days after you’d moved in. Down the hall, the neighbor’s baby starts to squall, and a couple downstairs resume the furiously yelled, trilingual argument that had awoken you, and possibly half the building, that morning. Suddenly, the air is crowded and heavy with minute tragedies. The compounded humiliations of that day, and so many days before it, bubble up around you. “I know what you’re thinking,” you say. “This entire craphole looks like the kind of place for immigrants and refugees, doesn’t it?” Hot poison sharpens the edges of your words so that the blades of your accent shine through, and you keep on going. “Well, news flash,” you gesture towards yourself. “Immigrant and refugee. And just to round out the stereotype,” you sketch a caustic curtsy, awkward in the crowded dark, “illegal.”

The door clicks shut, and there’s more silence, punctuated by the baby down the hall. “I- Twouf, I wasn’t thinking any of those things.” Karen’s voice sounds small and far away. “I just didn’t want to leave you alone until I was sure you were going to be OK.” It carries a note of reproach that you know you deserve. And suddenly, her hand is at your elbow, and she’s gently pulling you towards where you know you have your fold-out dining table and a couple of plastic chairs.

You let her, because you don’t know what else you can do. You’d wanted to become a lawyer, once. You’d studied for it, worked towards it. And even if you hadn’t reached the end-point of your ambitions, you think that you’ve gone through enough training so that you’re supposed to always know the right thing to say. Except you don’t.

One of your chairs scrapes against the floor, and she nudges you to sit down. You comply. You grip the side of your table when you feel the heat of her hand disappear from your arm, and there’s an ill-tempered creak as she opens the door of your secondhand fridge. “There’s plates and glasses in the plate caddy,” you mumble, cowed. You keep your face pointed downwards. You grind your eyes even more tightly shut so that a freshet of tears trickles down your cheeks.

Cutlery clatters quietly into the still air of your apartment, followed by the wet sound of liquids being poured. You don’t know what she makes of your little outburst, but at the very least, she’d probably warn you if she decides to call the cops. She seems like the kind who would. And you feel an affection for her that compounds your remorse. You had no call to lose your temper at her like that. She has been nothing but kind. Beautiful and glowing and perfect and kind, and you don’t know what to do with yourself, now that you’ve revealed that you’re an enormous jerk.

The side of a glass brushes against your knuckles. Obediently, you take it and give it a sniff. Milk. You wrinkle your nose into the glass, and her laughter startles you out of your funk. It’s all pastel colors and curves, and despite the awkwardness you’ve created, the thought occurs to you that you would do anything to hear her laugh some more.

“I think I saw chocolate syrup in the fridge, hold on.”

“I’d never really appreciated chocolate milk until I moved to America,” you say cautiously.

There is silence for a beat. 

“I’m sorry I exploded like that.”

She sighs. The fridge door opens again. Your cup pulls out of your hand, there is an oozing sound, and the clink of a spoon against fake glass fills the air. She nudges your hand for you to take your cup, and the sounds repeat themselves as she mixes her own glass. “You’re not having a good day, it happens to everyone,” she says. And you think you hear the wry, sympathetic quirk of her mouth as she speaks. “So you’re an illegal refugee?”

You shrug and hope you’re shrugging in the right direction. You make the tactical decision to ignore the fact that she emphasized the word, “refugee.” You’re feeling a little raw as it is. You aren’t ready to talk about that just yet. “Technically, I’m not,” you say. “I’m here on a tourist Visa right now, but I have no intentions of going back home. Legally speaking, I shouldn’t even be working.”

Karen hums a low, thoughtful sound, and you hear her swallow a mouthful of milk. “Damn, you’d think people in a law office would check for that kind of thing. Especially here in New York, city of ‘everyone is from everywhere else.’” She pauses thoughtfully, and her glass clicks against your table. “Then again, Nelson and Murdock hasn’t handled that many immigration cases yet. Which, considering the neighborhood, is kind of a surprise, now that I think about it.” She huffs and shakes her head. “I should’ve looked into your status. I’d assumed you were a dual citizen or something. Everything else about you seems pretty above board.” There is a note of self-deprecation there. You don’t blame her. You’re amazed you were able to get the job so fast.

But then again, you had shown up with a referral from Matt and Foggy's former instructor, and it hadn’t looked like there were going to be any other applicants willing to take a chance on a couple of Hell’s Kitchen ambulance chasers who’d barely had a year between their practice and their having passed the Bar. Nelson and Murdock’s office is crap, and the firm hardly looks like it can make rent every month, let alone pay anyone anything above minimum wage. And forget about medical. But it’s the best place you’ve ever worked for, and you realize that in an unfamiliar way, in this unfamiliar place, it is home.

In the silence, you can almost see her giving you a probing look. You’re too used to reading body language and visual cues, and your imagination rushes in to fill in the blanks. You fidget under her imaginary stare. “My other credentials are legit,” you say quickly. “I really did go to law school. I know how to law.”

She laughs that laugh, and a shivery warmth snakes through you. It makes you bite your lip. “’You know how to law?’ Seriously?”

“Yeah,” You let yourself smile. “I know how to law. I law good.”

“I know. Sometimes, I listen to the three of you talking about things like, I don’t know, ‘estoppel’ or article blank, section whatever of the something code, and I just have to tune you out.”

“And I take a mean witness affidavit.”

“Why don’t you go back to law school?” You stiffen at her words. She doesn’t notice, and carries on. “You could take night classes at CUNY, use it to get a student Visa and say that you’re also training with Nelson and Murdock on-the-job. It’ll keep Immigration from shipping you out in four months.”

You shake your head, and now the darkness seems too big and too close to the places inside you that you think could still be capable of casting light.

“I’m kinda tired, Karen,” you say. “I think I’m just going to medicate and turn in.”

“I’m sorry, was it something I said? It’s still light out.”

You pull your facial muscles into a smile you don’t feel. “That doesn’t really matter to me right now, does it?”


	10. Foggy

He passes by the next evening, and the smell of burgers wafts in from his spot in your doorway.

“You didn’t have to, Sir,” you say. But your traitorous stomach decides to lodge an extremely vocal complaint about how you haven’t had anything but bananas and chocolate milk since Karen left the afternoon before. Half your friends had been religiously vegetarian, back at home, but your Catholicism only ever got in the way of your diet at Lent, and right now, you’re just about ready to eat a live alley cat for want of meat.

“Eh, I was in the neighborhood,” he says. For once, he ignores your formality, and you silently thank him for that. And for not remarking on the unholy racket your stomach had put up. 

You hesitate before stepping aside so that he won’t be the strange white guy standing awkwardly in the hall.

When the door clicks shut, he curses. “Christ, it’s like living with Matt all over again.”

You make an interrogative noise as you pull out a chair for him to sit.

“Where’s the light switch? This place is freaking pitch black.”

“Crap, right. Um. It’s right beside the door. Just mind the hat rack. It’s ricket-“

CRASH.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry!”

“-it’s precarious,” you finish lamely. And you know that around his feet, the floor is covered in jackets and scarves and all the other flotsam and collateral damage from the bookshelf beside the rack.

“Um, hold on, I’ll just uh-“ There’s the sound of shuffling and the metallic clatter of your hat rack attempting to roll across your narrow, now extremely cluttered floor.

“It’s OK, I’ve got it.” You’ve spent most of that morning mapping your apartment into little quadrants. Emphasis on the “little.” Aside from medicating, you haven’t really bothered much with opening your eyes. You aren’t quite climbing the walls with boredom yet, but you’re definitely getting there. And you’ve done stranger things to keep the demons at bay.

You have every last corner of your space completely memorized now, and you step around the arc of space where you heard the crash, keeping to the walls. You accidentally step on a jacket, and you immediately identify it as your favorite, the ratty khaki one you’d worn on the plane ride here. You send up a silent prayer of thanks that you’re in stocking feet. It’s fleece-lined, and you hate the smell of the dry-cleaning chemicals you’d inevitably have to inhale if you need to have it cleaned. You pick it up, and something falls to the floor with a hollow metal clang.

You freeze.

“Um,” Foggy says, calling you back from a deeper dark. And he sounds even more lost than you.

You find the light switch. “Much better, thanks.”

There’s a series of clangs and metallic thuds as your hat rack comes upright under Foggy’s capable hands. You gather what fabric you can find from the floor, and try to hang them neatly on the re-positioned rack. 

He picks up another something made of metal from the floor, and suddenly you feel your stomach clench. “Oh hey, what’s this? This looks like that Steel Snake symbol they’d used for the heroin distribution part of Fisk’s operations. The one that used those Chinese illegals-”

You miss a couple of times before you find his hands, and you snatch it from his grasp. “It’s… I’m sorry. I’m sorry, this, um- I’m sorry. Uh. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The light hurts when you open your eyes. Your cheeks are wet.

“Hey,” he whispers. “Hey, Twofer, it’s OK.” You don’t realize you’ve been spinning in place until he puts his hand on your arm. It’s a warm, heavy weight, and you remember that your feet are still on the ground. You’re a little dizzy now. And you aren’t quite sure where you are.

You force yourself to exhale, long and slow. “Let’s… sit down.”

He grunts and takes the lead to the seven steps to your kitchenette.

“I’m sorry,” you say again. You run your fingers over the metal thing. It’s curved and sinuous and slices its shape into the palm of your hand.

“Stop apologizing, Buddy. Tell me what’s going on up there. Maybe I can help.”

You swallow and nod. The Steel Snake is heavy against your skin. It cuts into your flesh and leaves the meat of you cold where it touches.

Your fiancé’s eyes burn hot and red in your memory. “Do it.” His irises washed out under the corrosion cutting into his face. “You’ll be free,” he’d said. And he held the eyedropper towards you, smiling as the light dimmed.

You inhale. “It’s to remind me-” you choke on your own breath, and you inhale again. Unconsciously, you bring your hand to your face and cover your eyes. “It’s to remind me of what I’d almost become.”

Foggy hisses.

It’s a strange, sad sound. His fingers brush your hair out of the sides of your face. “Oh wow,” he murmurs. “That’s how that happened.” He brushes away a trickle of thick fluid from your cheek. You don’t flinch. “I’m sorry.” You don’t know how he manages to pull all of this out of you so easily, but his kindness makes you feel so much more safe.

You shake your head. And your smile, when you find it inside you, is brittle and small. “Stop apologizing, Buddy,” you echo mockingly. “It’s in the past.” 

He snorts. “You’re all tiny and proper and polite, with your ‘Good morning,’ and your ‘yes Sir, no Sir.’ But here you are, just about as hardcore as they come.”

You shake your head. “I’m nothing,” you say. “I couldn’t even make things right.” You’re shaking again.

“What, it isn’t enough that you’re Catholic and functionally blind right now? Are you going to put on a mask and skulk around in alleys and rooftops too?” There’s a sharp intake of breath, and from the sounds across from you, you think that maybe he’s clapped his hands over his mouth.

“Too?

There’s a rush of air, which you assume is Foggy waving in a gesture of dismissal. “Pah, never mind.”

There are too many layers to those words and in his tone. You don’t know if you want to peel them back. You don’t want to impose. He’ll tell you about that if and when he feels it’s right.

“I… I tried to report it to the authorities. I didn’t want more people getting hurt, but they had protection. My country’s pretty much completely economically dependent on the country immediately to our north, and whoever those people were, they had connections there. So when I tried to lodge a complaint, I got turned around and put through the bureaucratic rigmarole until all I was doing was jumping through hoops. I wasn’t studying, I wasn’t attending classes, I wasn’t doing anything but that, for months on end.”

“Ah,” he says, “That’s why Kafka.”

Despite yourself, you feel your mouth quirk at the fact that he remembered that rotgut-sodden conversation you’d had at Josie’s after your first day there.

“I needed to make it right. But then they started saying that it was a diplomatic incident, that I was besmirching the religious traditions of the Immortal Celestial Kingdom of K’un-Zi. Except technically, K’un Zi doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale, one of the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, one of those kinds of places that only exist every hundred years or ten years or something.”

“Bzuh?”

“Exactly. And I’m pretty sure you haven’t watched as many _wuxia_ movies as I have.”

“Aren’t those, like, Chinese fantasy martial arts movies? Did they tell you that their kung fu was stronger than yours?”

You nod, and a real smile steals briefly across your lips. It’s such a _Foggy_ remark, and you feel the pulled bowstring of your shoulders loosen just a tiny bit. “It got a little weirder than that,” you say. Even though you don’t quite want to go into any detail about that just yet.

You let silence settle into the blanks he expects you to fill, and he concedes with a soft sigh. You both have things that you aren’t ready to say. “So… basically, you tried to deal with it legally and above-board, but nobody in your government was having any of it.”

You shake your head. “There were people who tried to help. But nothing came of it. Worse. When I kept on going, I got threatened with a treason charge, and they said that they’d go after my family. A good person got killed. A really good person.” Your voice breaks, and you clench your fist.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So now you’re here. Land of the Free.”

“Home of the Brave.” You feel your lip curl in self-loathing. “As brave as cowards get, anyway. Running away.”

“Whoa, hey, no-“

“She died because of me.”

“Twofer. I don’t know who that person is, but you know what happened with Ben and Elena, right?”

“That’s different, they made their own choices, and all of you were just trying to do what was right.”

“Exactly.”

The silence between you hangs like a bank of suffocating cloud.

In the darkness, you find his hand and grasp it tight.

“Thank you.”


	11. Dancing with the Devil

It’s the third day of your personal purgatory, and you don’t know what time it is when you hear someone tap at the window over your fire escape. All the lights in your apartment are still off, and you’ve been alternating between listening to audiobooks and napping on the futon that doubles as your couch. You’ve lined your sleep-mask with gauze, and it’s been soaking up tears for hours. You smell like saltwater and antibiotics. You’ve been medicating, and there’s a soreness spreading behind your eyes and across your forehead that tells you that the medicine is doing its work. Still, you’re in no mood to go through the scraping agony of opening your eyes more than is strictly necessary. The entire top half of your head feels swollen and hot, and you’re not sure if any light would get through your eyelids even if you’d tried.

“Twofer.” It’s Matt’s voice, low and muffled by thin curtains and window-glass. “Twofer, let me in.” There’s a thready, rushed quality to it, with an unfamiliar note of savage command, and all the sleeping has left you muzzy and oddly compliant. So you make your way to your window and open it without pausing to think about how odd it is to have a blind man come up from a fire escape.

You hear him slip in accompanied by a light breeze carrying the coppery, sweetish stink of blood. He grips your shoulders and pushes you away from the window. A whip-sharp rush of movement stirs the air in front of you, punctuated by the sound of your window clicking shut and your curtains sliding closed. He leans against you for several harsh breaths.

“G- Matt, what the hell.” You almost slip and speak in your language, your still-sleepy tongue tripping over the honorific you’d attached to his name. Something is seriously wrong, and if you’re willing to brave the pain to check your phone for the time, then you’re sure as hell not going to let a little messed up corneal tissue keep you from knowing what’s going on. You lift your hand to pull off your sleep-mask.

He grabs your wrist with a speed and precision that forces reflex to override thought.

Your hands and posture shift into the forms your grandmother had literally pounded into you when you were little more than knee-high. You slip into his space, using his surprise and his stiff grip on your wrist to knock him out of balance while you ram your elbow into his solar plexus. 

Something in his clothes absorbs the impact, and instead of falling to the floor, gasping for breath, he staggers backwards with a sharp, shocked grunt.

Your family’s ambidextrous fighting style was made for close quarters weapons combat, and while you’re more comfortable with a knife or with wooden batons, you’re advanced enough to have mastered unarmed combat as well. You haven’t exactly been concentrating on your training (you’ve had other things on your mind, and your grandmother isn’t around to browbeat you into getting off your indolent ass), but your body flows into the movements as if you’ve still been putting in the family-enforced one hour per day. You immediately go on the offensive before he gets the chance to retaliate. You’re familiar with the crowded confines of your apartment, but you aren’t exactly comfortable in the dark, and you know that you have to narrow down the variables before he uses them to his advantage. You surge towards him, aiming to grab him by the back of the neck and pull him into a grapple that would press him against the wall. He stops you with a masterful block, and you can feel the rush of air against your arm as he steps aside.

“Twofer-” he gasps. But you’ve already engaged. A battle does not end until somebody has won.

His voice gives you something to aim for, and you deliver a series of blows directed at his head and torso. He parries and slips away, but one hit makes contact with his ribs, and he grunts again. You feel the wind and heat of him shift as he moves to counter. But you’re ready, and you sidestep and use his superior height to your advantage, trapping his arm and pulling it downwards so that he is bent awkwardly backwards against your shoulder. You pull him close, pinning him so that your elbow presses into his sternum and pushes him down even farther. You twist your shoulder down, placing pressure on his neck as you deliver a short, sharp kick to the backs of his knees. Unbalanced, he crumples against you, and you let his right arm bend at an unnatural angle. You bear down harder on his head with your shoulder, forcing it into an unnatural angle as well. He gags futilely, and you feel more than you hear the moment he pounds against the floor in concession of his defeat.

All your family has are its martial art, and all of the “honor” that the memory that this kind of thing still holds. All of you –your grandmother in particular- have suffered through the indignity of displacement, poverty, oppression, and repeated failures and defeat. But you’re not an asshole. Your family’s principle had always been to protect life. It was why your grandparents had moved to the country you’d once called home.

So you release him, get up, and step back.

“Holy shit,” he croaks into the darkness. And he says your full name perfectly, without stumbling over a single syllable. “You’re just full of surprises.”

The full realization of what you’ve just done and whom you have engaged dawns on you. “Oh my God!” You bend towards him, reaching forward to help him up. When he grasps your hand, you realize that you’d been off by several inches to the left. “I- I’m sorry. Boss, I’m really sorry. I didn’t think. I just- I’ve been a little on edge, and I wasn’t quite awake, and, and-”

“You’re fast,” he says as he gets up.

The compliment sinks in a moment after, and underneath your sleep mask, you feel your face heat up. “I’ve been training since I was three.”

Not that it matters. You, like most of your cousins, are simply competent fighters. You are not the warrior that your family needs, and knowing this, you’ve struggled with your duty to your family by forging your own clumsy and stumbling course with the law. Hey, if you can’t be your generation’s Chosen One, you can at least –eventually- send home some of your dollars so that the rest of the family can practice and survive.

He snorts. “You’ve got me beat,” he says. “I started age nine.”

Now you’re awake, and you know that there is a story behind that, too. So you have to ask. “Matt, why are you here?”

“It’s OK, just keep quiet. Everything’ll be fine.”

You know what fear feels like. You’ve had a blade pressed to your ribs in ill intent, and you’ve felt a man’s harsh, wet breaths in your ear, telling you to stay quiet. This is different. This is just weird. But it’s unnerving all the same.

And underneath the unfamiliar growl in his voice, it carries the same gently authoritative note it had had in the office, when you’d let go of his arm and suddenly felt small and lost in the crushing, impenetrable dark.

“What’s going-“

“Don’t,” he says before you can take off your mask again. This time, his sleeve makes a noise, and you hear him move before he rests his hand on your wrist. “Please, I know that’ll hurt. Just keep it on. Please. I’ll leave soon, I swear.”

And there’s a silence filled with a sense of listening. As if he’s waiting for some unknown danger to pass. The fabric of his gloves scratches against your skin. The silence stretches until you almost open your mouth to talk, then you hear Matt exhale. The weight and pressure of him pulls away.

“Thank you,” he says. “This will be our secret.” Your window opens with a small, protesting creak. There’s a breeze, and suddenly, you are alone again. And there’s nothing else you can think to do.


	12. Matt

“Good morning,” you say when you see a tall, man-shaped blur walk towards the office kitchenette that Friday. The space is away from the windows and the agonizingly bright daylight, and you’ve been lingering there, nursing your coffee in the shadows, since you arrived. His posture and coloring already mark him as Matt to you, but when he comes close enough for you to confirm that it’s him, you breathe a sigh of relief. You don’t have to turn on the lights. Your eyes are still sore, and you have to physically stop yourself from flinching whenever there’s bright light, but you’re not leaking all over everything anymore, and you’ve been through this enough to know that you’re going to be able to do your job. You’ll have to cut down on the “reading” component of legal research for the next week or so, but Matt has enough audio material to keep you productive. Besides, tomorrow is the weekend. You can rest some more then.

The kitchenette is washed in shades of gray and dark brown, and like everything else in your field of vision, Matt is blurry and haloed in far too much light. You want to wipe your glasses, but you know it won’t do you any good. He stiffens slightly and tilts his head towards you. “Hey Twofer,” he says in a tone you can only refer to as “wary.” You have no idea why. “How’re you feeling?”

“Much better, thank you.” You pause for a beat. “I’m really really sorry about that, Mr. Murdock.” You’re not sure what you’re apologizing for.

“Are we back to that again? Hadn’t we established that everyone here’s on a first name basis with everyone else?”

You duck your head. “Yeah, but that was so unprofessional of me. I mean, I’ve barely been with Nelson and Murdock for a month, and suddenly I disappear for almost an entire week? That’s just…” and you grope for the right term as your brain continues to circle stupidly around your home language’s concise, elegant term for “lacking in social awareness, which leads to shameful loss of face.” You snap your fingers. “-it’ s terrible form.”

He shakes his head and chuckles. “That was neither unprofessional, nor bad form. You had a health problem, that’s not exactly something you can schedule. I’m just glad it’s not something serious. Besides, it feels weird for you guys to call me anything but Matt.”

He opens the cupboard and runs his hand over the bottom until he finds a mug. He sniffs. “You made coffee already?” In the kitchenette’s dim half-light, he seems so utterly normal, so completely _himself_ , that the scuffle near your apartment’s fire escape feels divorced from reality.

You find yourself releasing a breath that you did not know you’d held. Your knees feel loose with relief. You are still just Twofer, and no one knows what else you have had to be. Even after everything you have revealed so far, you have no duty to Nelson and Murdock to be anything but yourself: legal researcher, precedent-finder, and conflict analyst. And maybe friend.

“Have you ever had those dreams where you think you’re awake, but you’re actually still asleep and absurd things happen?” you blurt.

Something tight in Matt’s posture loosens. “Yeah, I’ve had a couple of those,” he says. His hand hovers over the space where the coffee pot should be, but as usual, you’d spaced out and parked it beside the sink.

“Oh, sorry, uh, let me take care of that,” you say, touching his hand to let him know that you’ll fill his cup.

“Alright, thanks.” He stands in the shadows with his head slightly tilted, listening again. Focusing too hard still hurts, but you notice a tiny cut in the corner of his upper lip. It isn’t the worst you’ve seen from him. Last week, he came in with a truly epic shiner, and he had waved it off as a collision with an obstacle he had missed. And you wonder at that: at how to negotiate a world where so little can be known at any given time, and so many risks need to be taken on so much faith. Pain aside, the four days you had spent keeping your eyes mostly closed had been nerve-wracking. You’d alternated between frustration, boredom, and fear, and sleep had been your only reprieve. You know Matt has his own ways, but you can’t imagine what it would be like for darkness to be your entire life.

“I had one about you,” you say. 

It comes out unnervingly intimate. You suddenly feel the weird urge to reiterate that you’re more attracted to women than men. Which is something that he already knows, but given the fact that he’s your boss, and that the two of you are whispering to each other in the dark, it’s something that probably bears repeating. You and he are equally aware of the circumstances that qualify as “sexual harassment.” Which this isn’t. But also ew. Quite frankly, Matt’s a beautiful male specimen, and maybe in another universe you’d be wet down to your knees for him, but he’s your superior, and that’s just so very inappropriate.

“Yeah?”

You nod before you remember that nodding has no point for him. “I woke up and I couldn’t see, but I heard your voice in my fire escape, and then you climbed in. Then we got into a fight, like, um crazy… blind people kung fu –no offense, although I guess it technically isn’t offensive, since I couldn’t see either- but uh, I kicked your ass. Then you told me you’d been training since you were nine and to keep it our little secret, and then you left. Ridiculous, right?”

He shifts and grunts into his coffee. “Haha, blind people kung fu. Yep, that’s pretty insane.” There’s a tight note in his voice that you can’t quite place.

“So anyway,” he says, as if he’s shaken the subject off, “you think you can winkle out some material on that rent control case? I get the feeling the landlord’s going to countersue for illegal entry, so we’ll have to be ready.”

You’re relieved at the change in subject, and you latch on to it with eager claws. You’ve had four unproductive days in the dark, and you’ve been champing at the bit to get back to work. You hate feeling helpless. Useless. “Yeah, I thought so too. I’d already put together a list of the case law I wanted to look into before my eyeballs decided to attack me. I can give you the digests of the pertinent ones by the end of the day.”

He nods. “Let me know if you want to use my audio files.”


	13. Karen

You’re at your desk when she enters. You hear the door open and you recognize the sound of her favorite purple pumps, but you screw your eyes shut and press your headphones harder against your ears. One of Matt’s audio cases drones steadily into your ears, and you hope that she does not approach.

No such luck. Her hand is a warm, soft weight on your shoulder, and when you open your eyes to squint up at her, she gives you a cautious smile. “Hey Twouf,” she says.

You feel like an asshole for having told her to leave on that first day. You don’t know how you’ll be able to face her now.

You pause the mp3 and put your headphones away. “Good morning,” you say with what you hope is a suitably expressive combination of contrition and grace.

“Feeling better?”

You smile and gesture wryly at your face. “I’m not crying anymore.”

And the room brightens with her smile. “Yeah, I didn’t like seeing you so sad.”

“I looked sad?”

She nods, eyes soft.

You don’t know how to respond to that. So you lean back and gesture awkwardly. “I was just… extremely annoyed. I hate it when the eye thing happens. It really keeps a girl from getting through her day.” Now that you hear yourself say it, you know that your words are insincere. “I get touchy when they flare up,” you backpedal lamely. 

“I’m sorry.” That, at least, sounds real.

Karen rests her hip against the side of your desk and gives you a long, searching look. “Don’t apologize,” she says. “Tell Foggy and Matt about your residency problem. They’re good. They’ll help.”

You start to shake your head, but Karen rests her hand on your cheek. Her skin smells like dishwashing liquid and citrus fruits. You resist the physical urge to press your lips to her palm. 

“You’re safe here, Twofer. I promise. I know.”


	14. Nelson and Murdock

The ceiling light in the conference room is giving you a headache. Or rather, it is making your existing eyestrain headache even worse.

You nervously twiddle your thumbs and stare at the familiar scuffs on the secondhand wood.

You don’t know if you’re ready to talk about this. You don’t know if you ever will be.

But then again, Karen’s right. You need help.

“Just be honest,” Karen says, rubbing your shoulder reassuringly. It feels nice, although it’s really not doing much for your concentration.

Foggy’s the first one to pop his head into the cramped little room. “Karen said you wanted to talk to us?”

You nod and shift uncomfortably in your seat as Foggy enters, Matt trailing at his elbow.

“I, uh, I haven’t been entirely honest with you guys,” you say.

Karen is a warm glow beside you, and she squeezes your hand to tell you to go on.

“I’m not really supposed to be working. I’m here on a B-1/B-2 Visa. I could get deported if I stay here for longer than six months. But I can’t go back. It’s too dangerous.” Your throat is raw and tight as you speak, but it all spills out of you: your involvement with the cult of the Steel Snake, the treason threat, the person you’d gotten killed. Foggy knows most of this, of course. But he listens and does not interrupt.

You aren’t sure where your words stop and where their advice begins, but the subject eventually turns to an application for official refugee status, and then the continuation of your education. The conference room no longer feels quite so small.

“Just so we’re clear, we can’t represent you,” Foggy finally says. “Our employer-employee relationship is a conflict of interest.” His smile turns sly. “You’ll have to study hard and see about representing yourself.”

They think they’re so clever.

Still, you can’t help but smile. “Only if you’ll advise me and give me access to your resources so I’ll know what to look out for,” you reply. And so fine, they’ve won you over. They’re lawyers. Their arguments had been sound.

Later, you get up to fix the afternoon coffee. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Matt stop and pretend to sneeze next to your desk. When you get back with your coffee, there are brochures for at least four different law programs on your blotter, and you swallow around the warm, happy lump that’s formed in your throat.


	15. Cousin

“Elder Brother,” you say to your cousin, giving him a respectful nod.

“Little Sister,” he replies. And he breaks into an enormous grin and immediately stabs a ballpoint pen at your throat.

You’re ready though, and you’re out of range and have your scarf twisted around his wrist in two neat moves. You give the scarf a yank, which outbalances him, but fails to make him fall. Instead, he uses the momentum to pull you forward, successfully landing an open-handed blow to your ribs. You let the impact flow through you and push you aside, shifting your stance so that your foot is placed strategically behind his. You fling your end of the scarf over his head and shove him. He trips over your ankle, but he grabs you by the shoulder and uses the momentum to knock you to the ground.

He may be even rustier than you are, but he has mass and reach on his side, and you hit the ground full force. You feel the impact rattle up your spine and flare around the spot in your torso where he’d landed his hit. You dodge before he can take you into a grapple, and you counter with two sharp blows to his thigh and kidneys as you come up. He lands a knee to the nerve near your shoulder joint, and you spit out a stream of invective you’ve picked up from your days working the legal aid branch office near the slum back at home.

He pulls away, laughing. “My God, Little Sister. Language!”

“You’ve been putting all that fancy doctor anatomy knowledge to good use,” you grate out, still curled around your shoulder. Your entire upper left side is buzzing with painful tingles, and you can barely clench your fist. 

He helps you straighten up, rubbing your shoulder gently. “You’ll be fine. Come on, let’s get some cold compresses.”

You let him pull you into his kitchen area, but you make indistinct grumbling noises all the while. It gratifies you a little to see that he’s favoring his right leg. “You’ve been neglecting your training,” you say. “You should have been able to take me out by your third move.” Maybe you’re overstepping by saying this to an elder whom you haven’t properly spoken with in years, but both of you had been subjected to your grandmother’s endless lectures about a family member’s duty to help one another maintain mastery over technique. He understands.

He hums in agreement, and gingerly runs a hand along what is undoubtedly a bruise forming in his lower back. “You haven’t been a very good daughter either. That was a sloppy takedown.” He hands you a couple of cold packs for your shoulder and your ribs, and presses one of his own to his thigh.

You haven’t seen him since you arrived in the States, and you’d been so distracted then, that you hadn’t had the chance to get a good look. “How are you, Elder Brother?” you ask. He’s gained weight, and he doesn’t look like he’s been getting much sleep. Now that you’re paying attention, you’re starting to see the beginnings of a receding hairline pushing back the edges of his forehead. It fills you with a fragile sadness that you don’t know how to grasp, and you briefly think about childhood and the scent of sweat and summer fruits and upturned soil.

He sighs and sinks into one of the stools around his kitchen island. “Tired,” he replies. “I had a thirty-six hour surgery earlier this week. It was supposed to be a routine procedure, less than sixteen hours, but there were complications. It had been a really close call.” His gaze turns inward, and there’s a turmoil there that you can never know. “The patient lived, which is great, but it doesn’t change the fact that, honestly, I’m still pretty drained.”

You use your scarf to tie the cold compress on your torso in place, and you frown at him in concern. “I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “I really needed this,” he says. He smiles sadly at you. “I’ve missed it.”

You give your arm an experimental flex. There’s less tingling, but you should probably be gentle on it for the next couple of days. “I’m sorry,” you say again.

What you don’t say, and what he now knows, is that you’ll be seeing each other more regularly. Improving one another’s technique. Watching out that the other stays capable of holding their own in a fight. That’s what family should do for one another. Among many other things, of course.

The sunlight coming in from his window is early October gray, and a cozy silence wraps around you both.

“And you, Little Sister. How are you?”

Logically speaking, you should know that this kind of question would come. He is a family member who cares about you, whom you haven’t seen in a long time. Still, it catches you off guard. You think about the past few months, about how far you’ve traveled and how much you’ve changed. You think about Nelson and Murdock. And a familiar softness spreads underneath your bones.

In your mind’s eye, you turn the long, sinuous curve of your old pain in your hand. And it no longer cuts as deep.

You look at your cousin, and you think about the things you’ve shared with him: filial duty, a mutual failure that fuels an abiding need to excel, the close and complex tangle of honor and tradition and love that you have both chosen to carry inside of you and physically leave behind.

There are secrets that you aren’t yet ready to tell him, and there are things about yourself that you will eventually reveal. But this, at least, is something that you feel ready to say aloud.

“I’m happy, Elder Brother.”

And you know that it is true.

“I think I’ve found a place where I belong.”

 

-End-

**Author's Note:**

> This has not been beta-read. Corrections and constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> I imagine Twofer's family fighting style as an amalgam of different Southeast Asian martial arts. Several SEA systems incorporate ~~everything~~ the sarong or malong (which is sort of like an infinity scarf, only bigger and usually made with embroidered or batik-dyed starched cotton) as a weapon, and in the final chapter, Twofer employs a sarong entanglement technique with her (ordinary) scarf, like this one: https://youtu.be/HPRsTNbsc9M?t=2m41s
> 
> And as for home-life, imagine a houseful of kids capable of doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsC7hUmfrqo Why? Because one of them is bound to be good enough to try and battle Shou-Lao the Undying for the title of K'un-Lun's Immortal Iron Fist (or become just about any Immortal Weapon) and eventually return to the old country to fight a dictatorship. Eventually. Maybe. Except that the dictatorship had fallen three decades ago, and torture can do funny things to a person’s mind. So yeah.
> 
> Also: Appeal to your suspension of disbelief regarding the PoV character's comfort with American colloquialisms -- This fictional country has heavy exposure to American media, which was facilitated by early 20th Century American neo-colonial economic interests, cultural appropriation, and the use of English as a medium of instruction in public schools. Um. Yeah. That's it. That's plausible. Yes.
> 
> #waytoomuchbackstory


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